"The new Moon in Aquarius on February 15 2018 at 1:05 pm PST, also an eclipse, begins the year of the Earth Dog.

Dog year is a time of fairness and equality. Controversial issues are given their due, revolutions are successful, politics are liberal, and political oppression is opposed. Integrity and honesty are the values that lead to success under Dog’s watchful and just influence.

Earth Dog possesses some of the finest qualities of any of the 60 animal signs of the Chinese zodiac." ~Susan Levitt

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Publisher's Synopsis

From the esoteric account of the evolution of the species to the occult roots of science, from the secrets of the Flood to the esoteric motives behind American foreign policy, here is a narrative history that shows the basic facts of human existence on this planet can be viewed from a very different angle. Everything in this history is upside down, inside out and the other way around.

At the heart of The Secret History of the World is the belief that we can reach an altered state of consciousness in which we can see things about the way the world works that are hidden from us in our everyday, commonsensical consciousness. This history shows that by using secret techniques, people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and George Washington have worked themselves into this altered state - and been able to access supernatural levels of intelligence.

There have been many books on the subject, but, extraordinarily, no one has really listened to what the secret societies themselves say. The author has been helped in his researches by his friendship with a man who is an initiate of more than one secret society, and in one case an initiate of the highest level.

"The startling revelations that form the core of this book show the world as deeply strange and mysterious, filled with secrets and codes, with humanity at the heart of a grand cosmic riddle." ~Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods

"Booth’s luminous prose, his fast-paced storytelling, and his astonishing breadth and depth of knowledge about a multitude of secret societies provide breathtaking glimpses into worlds that heretofore have been little explored... A brilliant, exhaustive, ground-breaking study." ~ForeWord Magazine

"This book divides humanity into two parts. There are the unawakened majority who take things literally, and the privileged few in the know. The author aims to share the knowledge around. His book has plentiful and interesting illustrations and is obviously the product of many years of wide reading. The material is delivered with a moral earnestness that makes it harsh to suggest the book is a cynical potboiler. But a sense of déjà vu may sweep over you as you turn pages that feature Atlantis and the Temple of Solomon, Merlin and Leonardo, Mary Magdalene and Isaac Newton, chakras and tulpas, astral bodies and altered states.

'The moment it all came together,' the author says, was in a second-hand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells. It's a shame for him that the moment occurred after, not before, The Da Vinci Code. We've become habituated to great blockbusters stuffed with derivative nonsense. The internet has made every man his own occultist. Accordingly, Black (Booth) greatly overestimates his capacity to surprise us. This is a world of celebrity Scientologists. It is a world that yawned and said 'whatever' when confronted by the theory that the British royal family are descended from giant lizards. The reader is not going to be shocked by some amateur reinterpretation of the Bible." ~Hilary Mantel, The Guardian

Excerpt

"In 1776 a Bavarian professor of law, Adam Weishaupt, founded an organisation called the Illuminati, recruiting the first brothers from amongst his students. Like the Jesuits, the Illuminati brotherhood was run on military lines. Members were requested to surrender individual judgement and will. Like earlier secret societies, Weishaupt's Illuminati promised to reveal an ancient wisdom. Higher and more powerful secrets were promised to those who progressed up the ladder of initiations. Initiates worked in small cells. Knowledge was shared between cells on what modern security services call a 'need to know' basis - so dangerous was this newly rediscovered knowledge.

Weishaupt joined the Freemasons in 1777, and soon many of the Illuminati followed, infiltrating the lodges. They quickly rose to positions of seniority. Then in 1785 it came about that a man called Jacob Lanz, travelling to Silesia, was struck by lightning. When he was laid out in a nearby chapel, the Bavarian authorities found papers on the body revealing the secret plans of the Illuminati. From these papers, including many in Weishaupt's own hand, and together with others seized in raids around the country, a complete picture was built up.

The seized writings revealed that the ancient wisdom and the secret supernatural powers promulgated within the Illuminati had always been a cynical invention and a fraud. An aspirant progressed through the grades only to discover that the spiritual elements in the teachings were merely a smokescreen.

Spirituality was derided, spat upon. Jesus Christ's teachings, it was said, were really purely political in content, calling for the abolition of all property, of the institution of marriage and all family ties, all religion. The aim of Weishaupt and his conspirators was to set up a society run on purely materialistic grounds, a revolutionary new society - and the place where they would test their theories, they had decided, would be France.

Finally it was whispered in the candidate's ear that the ultimate secret is that there is no secret. In this way he was inducted into a nihilistic and anarchistic philosophy that appealed to the candidate's worst instincts. Weishaupt gleefully anticipated tearing down, destroying civilisation, not to set people free, but for the pleasure of imposing his will upon others."

Biography

Mark Booth taught philosophy and theology at Oriel College, Oxford and has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is currently the publishing director at Century in London.